Kelly Roach Talks Entrepreneurial Success Through Conviction Marketing

This month, I had the opportunity to sit with business strategist, coach and bestselling author Kelly Roach. Kelly is also the founder of Kelly Roach Coaching Human Family Foundation, the cofounder of The Courageous Brand, The Advanced Women’s Expert Network and Social Sellers’ Academy.

Dennis Postema: Your new book, “Conviction Marketing,” is coming out in February. How is this book different from your others?

Kelly Roach: It is wildly different from my other books, but it’s also the next building block in helping online entrepreneurs understand how to build epic, dominating, worldclass brands. The noise in online marketing is at an all-time high. There’s zero barrier to entry, and it’s getting crazier, especially with the Great Resignation that’s going on right now. Millions of businesses are pivoting from brick-andmortar into the online space.

What does that mean for the average online business owner? It means you’d better understand how to differentiate your brand in a meaningful way. Otherwise, you will never get discovered, seen, heard and paid. It’s all well and good if we show up online and create lots of content and have great intentions around what we want to do and who we want to serve, but if no one sees or hears you online, that’s a big problem. Dennis: How do you stand out within that noise right now?

Kelly: The biggest thing is breaking down the mindset and the methodology to understand how to go from being one in a million to being a category of one. A category of one brand can be in any market, big or small, any industry, big or small. The vast majority of marketing online right now is called “Me Too Marketing.” Literally, it’s people waving their hand, saying, “Oh yes, I do this too. I cover this in my program also. I saw my competitor running an ad about ABC, I’d better talk about that also, otherwise people won’t choose me.”

This has completely taken over the online space. And I don’t know about you, but when I started my business, I certainly did not envision building a brand in which I go see what is trending on TikTok to lip-synch. And I certainly didn’t create a business so I could go create reels on Instagram where I dance around and point at things. I started a business to make a difference in the world. So I created this book because I wanted to give everyone a framework to understand how we went from a seven-figure to an eight-figure brand online in the business coaching space, which is extremely fragmented. There’s almost no other business at our level, especially female-founded ones, and we did it over a period of a year.

Dennis: How would you define conviction marketing?

Kelly: Conviction marketing [means] actually standing for something and knowing what your beliefs are about, what impact you want to make in the world with the work that you’re doing, and what you’re willing to do about it. That is really central to building a category-one brand. In the book, I give a framework and a methodology and explain the mindset. The book is all about empowering people to stop doing inauthentic marketing that really doesn’t match their values and start going to market with provocative, thoughtful pieces that will actually speak to their target market.

There’s a lack of innovation, new ideas and thoughtful perspective. This idea that was once called thought leadership

has basically evaporated. We still call it thought leadership, but there isn’t a lot of thinking going on. I wrote this book to help people find themselves again. That’s really what it’s all about: rediscovering who you are, rediscovering why you built this business, rediscovering what message you have in your heart, in your soul, about what you want to do in the world, the difference you want to make, and then how to translate that into the content you create, the launches you do, the marketing materials you put forth that are really gonna elevate and differentiate you in a very noisy world.

Dennis: Last month I interviewed 14 women, and every one of them talked about their email list, either on-screen or off. Every one of them talked about how Facebook changes, Instagram changes, but the email lists never change, and taking care of your email list and nurturing that is always going to be something that you can’t take away. Do you have any comments on that?

Kelly: I’ll take it a step further and tell you that we really focus on getting people’s phone numbers, their email addresses, and their physical mailing addresses, and we’ll send out copies of my book for free to people constantly in exchange for a physical address. You’re absolutely right—any one of these platforms can go to paid, can disappear, can completely stop working for you at any time. We had a launch earlier this year where Facebook was going through some algorithm change. We’d invested $100,000 in ads and no one saw the content. We’re accustomed to doing multimillion-dollar launches every single time. We have a very dialed-in process and strategy, very predictable outcome, and it was like overnight, one change to the algorithm, and boom. Luckily for us, we have 18 other mechanisms for closing clients and one of them is our sales team getting on the phone with people. But what you’re talking about is the foundation of sales success. It is relationship building with people over time.

Social media is not your business. You don’t own social media. We already know people are aging out of Facebook. Your population is aging out of Facebook, and I always like to look at things like this: if I look back 20 years from now, am I gonna be proud of how I’m showing up, of what I’m doing, of who I’m being? Most people reading this don’t want, 20 years from now, to be on the latest new social media that all the cool kids are on and have to be doing these challenges and these new games that they’re doing and follow along. So to me, it’s very, very important that you look at your business like an investor, and you make strategic investments in building it in a way that you don’t have to participate in what you don’t want to, whether it’s now or down the line.

marketing, that list— whether it’s your email list, your phone number list, your physical address list—that you can send things to is one of those fundamentals that has been completely lost in the online world.

I think a lot of people see the perception of social media of what it means to be a CEO or what it means to be an entrepreneur, and then they get in it and they’re like, “What is this? This isn’t what I signed up for. This isn’t what Instagram told me this was gonna be like to run my own business. This is awful.” So I think we have to prepare people, we have to empower people, we have to be truth tellers about what it really takes, because otherwise, some people who really do have some great gifts that could make a huge difference in the world are going to opt out of entrepreneurship because the dream they were sold is not the reality they’re going to be living.

Dennis: Why do you think we’ve gotten away from sales so much? been kind of dumbed down and oversimplified. I remember when I first started as an entrepreneur, the thing I was most passionate about was teaching entrepreneurs sales, because I had this great sales background and I knew I could change so many people’s lives and help them achieve financial freedom. I remember the first thing I did was launch a product teaching people how to sell, and it completely bombed. Completely bombed. I learned very quickly that entrepreneurs live in this fabricated fantasyland where you

don’t sell anything, so I changed the word “sales” to “marketing” and all of a sudden, my business started exploding.

We’ve glossed over, dumbed down and oversimplified what it takes to be successful. Every role in an organization is a sales role. When I lead my 50-person team, I’m selling them on what we’re executing as an organization. Every manager is a salesperson getting their team to buy into what they need them to execute. Your marketing team, of course, is sales. Then we have a sales team, and of course, that’s what they do. We have to live in reality, not in fantasy, and if you want to build a successful business, there has to be someone in the business that’s focused on generating [sales].

Dennis: Can you explain the concept of being a business athlete?

Kelly: When someone sees someone like you or me online and they see the energy and the success and the results and the multimillion-dollar business, that feels really exciting and inspiring, and people want to jump on board. They want to work with you. They want to be in your program. That’s all wonderful, but the vast majority of people are really not looking to do the work it takes to achieve the results they want. So I started having a very direct and open, honest conversation with the market, even in my launches, where I started sharing that I’m only interested in working with business athletes, and if you’re not willing to be a business athlete, you kinda need to wrap it up and shut it down. That’s why 85% of businesses still fail.

We have information and education coming out of our ears on YouTube and podcasts. You can watch free business education 24 hours a day, seven days a week if you want to. But there’s a difference between consuming information and taking intentional, focused action. I really like to challenge people’s thinking around this idea of are you willing to be a business athlete? What does an athlete do? They run drills, they recover quickly from injuries, they fall down, they get back up again, they fail often and fail quickly and learn from it so they can get better and move forward. These are the things that I see are lacking so much in the world of entrepreneurship, and it’s why so many businesses don’t make it. So I’m trying to educate the world entrepreneurship on the mindset and the commitment it takes to become that multimillion-dollar CEO. It’s not about manifestation or about wishful thinking or about positivity, although I love all those things—I’m a huge fan and a huge student of personal development— but at the end of the day, intentional and focused action where you can move quickly through failure and learn from it and recover it and move forward—these are the secret keys to the kingdom.

Dennis: Tell me a little about the philanthropy work you’re doing with the Human Family Foundation.

Kelly: Our goal when we started off a couple years ago was to make a donation to charity water for every client that we closed. As the company began to grow and grow, we thought we could build an entire well. So in about 2019, we fully funded our first well. Then we decided we wanted to donate to meaningful

projects around the world and make a difference. Not necessarily to give the money to an organization, but to directly donate and directly give back.

The Human Family Foundation is our channel for giving back and making a difference. But the even more important piece is to create a generation of entrepreneurs that build giving back into their business from day one, even when they’re starting small, even when it might be $0.50 cents a month. We were a baby company when we started with a donation of $30 a month, which, by the way, brings clean drinking water to one person for the rest of their life. So, you can’t say that we can’t all make a difference. We can. And you can do it from the very beginning. That’s a huge focus with the Human Family Foundation. How can we encourage all entrepreneurs to make this a part of their business model, no matter how big or small, from day one?

Dennis: What would you tell an overworked entrepreneur the secret is to becoming a seven-figure CEO? this idea of focusing on the fundamentals in the world of entrepreneurship, running a business is simplified down to generating sales. And we all know that it doesn’t matter how big your launch is or how many sales you can make—if you don’t have systems, infrastructure and a winning team behind that, you’ll lose every dollar you make. So the secret to going from six figures to eight is to focus on five systems from the standpoint of being able to scale your sales on the front and then being able to institute the systems, the infrastructure and the people on the back end so that the business runs like a well-oiled machine, is sustainable, and has the components of what it takes to operate a business versus just having a sales mechanism.

A lot of people don’t understand the distinction between the two, but there aren’t a lot of business teachers out there who are helping people understand these things. That’s really the biggest difference between what I do and what a business coach does. I’m really a strategist, and my focus is helping people to understand the core fundamentals that go into building a sustainable company, not just how to generate sales.

Dennis: What advice would you give to somebody who’s thinking about becoming an entrepreneur and starting their own business right now?

Kelly: The most important thing is to build your relationship with imperfect action and failure. Anyone today can be successful as an entrepreneur if they have the grit, the tenacity, the willingness to show up on social media every day. Anybody can do it, but you have to build a positive association with failure to extract the learnings that will be required to get you where you’re trying to go. So I would say really focus on that relationship with failure and extracting the learnings, and allow yourself to try to test and play in the playground of imperfect action, because that’s how you innovate, that’s how you really land on the core concepts that will be central to how your business grows.

To get on the waiting list for Kelly’s new book, visit convictionmarketing.com.

Kelly on the hard work of success.

I think that the more we take a cue from the world of athletics, the more successful we’ll all be. I think that the world of entrepreneurship has become very soft, and it doesn’t help anyone. For those of us who are teachers, educators and mentors, part of our job is the education, the inspiration, the teaching, the passing the torch on the fundamentals of what makes people successful. But another piece of it is really helping people mentally prepare for the journey. Because if you can’t mentally sustain staying in the game, that’s the thing that’ll take you out.

I tell my team and my clients to focus on their mental and physical health. It’s hard enough as it is, but if you are not able to mentally sustain moving from failure to failure and learning and then adjusting and not taking things personally and being able to dust yourself off and reset for more, that’s the thing that takes people out. I think there’s this whole conversation about the mental toughness element necessary to achieve success, and then there’s another conversation about instilling the fundamentals, but they’re really two sides of the same coin. To help really empower people, we have to focus on both.

However hard you think you’re going to work to make your business a success, multiply it times a thousand. All the most successful people in the world are also the hardest-working people in the world. That doesn’t mean you don’t work smart. That doesn’t mean you burn the candle. I get eight hours of sleep every single night, I exercise every single day. But there’s discipline there. There is an intentionality. There is an intensity of focus that all very successful people have.